Typing About Cats In Space

So, here we are, chasing around every other corner of existence (and existence has lots and lots of corners, as it turns out) looking for the one thing that will bring me some rest and, quite possibly, my own, probably very unpleasant, demise. The cats are not optimistic. They’ve chased enough things into corners to know that there is no such thing as a happy cornered creature. But, here we go, off on another errand to another corner, in hopes that whatever bit of the universe we bring back to The Thirteenth will keep them occupied for a bit longer and keep us alive while we try to figure out how to undo this enormous, recursive, elusive, recursive, ridiculous, recursive, mess of a corner we’re in.”

–end log entry–

—————– PART ONE —————–

A long time ago, well, three hundred years ago that is, a small anthropological study took some samples from a population in a mid-continental savannah. From this sample came one particular primate and two very particular felines. This is their story, along with, well, billions of others. Because the universe is a big place with lots of people in it. Though, to be honest, we’re going to seriously skimp on just about everyone else’s stories in this particular tale.

Of course, what probably caught your eye in the preceding paragraph was the mention of continents, because as we all know, you can’t have a continent without at least a few oceans, otherwise it’s just plain old boring land. If your planet is reasonable lucky, your plain old boring land will have some lakes, most likely they’ll be very much like the lakes your ancestors flopped out of all those messy, methane-filled millennia ago. But, if your planet is really, really, lucky, you’ll have oceans and smaller bits of dry land that seem to float on those big wet oceans, from which will come a whole herd of weird and wonderful life forms. Why, you’ll have a planet that runneth over with a mind-boggling assortment of critters and creepers and shoots and leaves and they’ll all want to eat each other which will lead to all sorts of other wonderfully diverse animals and plants and then, just when it’s getting REALLY interesting, an asteroid will come along and kill off most of the stuff that made things so interesting for your planet, thus making the place suitable for the local variety of human, who, at least with all sorts of critters and crawlers to bedevil him or her, may just develop into something more interesting than the usual human the universe gets, which is just about as interesting as the landscape on a planet with no oceans and just stinky little lakes. Yes, the universe is filled with people from Kansas. Who don’t get out much, despite the near-universality of interstellar travel.

So, CONTINENTS! That means, reasonably interesting, if not exactly reasonable, humans and interesting critters. And a survey party from Edgar’s Mostly Brown Planet has just arrived with a bunch of sample cages that are just begging to be filled.

“This time, I’d really like to be filled with something that has horns,” said an avocado and puce sample cage. “Pleeeeeease?” “Horns?” “No more slime. Or compound eyes.”

No one ever listens to the sample cages. Sorry about that. Just wait until it gets loaded up with this trip’s load. Oh, the wailing. There’s a reason sample cages are kept on the cargo deck and it’s not the smell from what’s inside them, either.

And now, a word about sampling procedures. Messy. Don’t let some swaggering space “explorer” tell you otherwise, the collection of and storage of xenobiological specimens is just as messy as urine test day at SuperEspresso. Body parts shaking, fluids flying everywhere, odd smells and cross looks exchanged over and over again. After all, you are taking one life form from its home and stuffing it into an insufferably whinging sample crate, and the sampled life form, more often than not, doesn’t even have the decency, for Thirteenth’s sake, to have a proper set of horns. So, things get messy. Even messier if horns are actually involved.

Unfortunately for the sample crate, the samples to be collected on this jaunt do not have horns. They do have, however, claws, teeth, fur, fingernails, bits of aluminum chlorhydrate rubbed on the smelly bits, a poorly-named fungus and several very bad attitudes. Yes, today we’re abducting a human and two cats.

————

It was Scooter who first noticed that there was something wrong in the room. Bringing her face out of the fluffy thicket that is her tail, she held her head high and her ears scanned the room while her eyes fixed on the owner of the knee she’d been sleeping on a moment before.

“RurrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrr,” she grumbled, while shaking the cobwebs and shedding hair from her eyes.

Scooter likes sleeping and does not like having her sleep interrupted, especially by raiding parties accompanied by shipping containers that keep asking if she has, by any chance, horns or, Thirteenth forbid, compound eyes.

“Those are awfully large eyes on that,” said the sample cage, its target laser pointing at a scowling Scooter on top of the bed in the next room, “are you sure they’re not compound eyes? I hate animals with compound eyes. They’re always looking at you.”

“Listen, you cringing container” replied Noelvar, 1st assistant to the Collection Agent, “yer a sample cage, and as such, my squarish squire, all any of your ‘clients’ can see is yer innards. Now shut yer gob.”

“But only for the next few minutes, because you know, we’re going to be needing it fairly soon, what with all this collecting we’re going to be doing,” said Kevin, Intern Collection Agent, of Edgar’s Reasonably Priced Space Navy (for hire).

Kevin scratched his three eyelids in order, wrinkled the bump in the middle of them and took in a deep breath as he paged through the purchase/collection/repo orders on his very natty clipboard. Apparently, he was to collect the entire family living in this suburban house on the prairie. “Oh happy night, I do hate breaking up families,” he thought to himself as he looked around the lower level bedroom he and his team had just entered. Affixing the night vision goggle to his middle eye, he scanned the room and took inventory:

Furniture- One bed; two dressers; a disturbingly bright red leather recliner; a single night-stand w/lamp, radio and several small floppy bookish things. Kevin did not come from a planet with magazines, and as such lacked a word to properly describe the pile of small floppy bookish things.